In the photographic series Todos Americanos, artist Jose Arias has captured over 2,000 portraits of his immediate and extended family, altogether representing a range of geographies and communities throughout California: from the Bay Area to the Central Valley, across greater Los Angeles, through the Imperial Valley, to the U.S.-Mexico border. The central question guiding this body of work is, “What does it mean to be an American?” No inquiry feels more direct and critical in 2021, particularly for younger generations, who are coming of age at a time of immense cultural shifts and political fracturing. Through intimate portraits, Arias creates a visual archive of ordinary americanos living their everyday lives: sitting around the dinner table, hanging out in the yard, making a trip to Home Depot. In its true plurality, the term “all-American” is reclaimed for Latinx communities living in the U.S. The images are relatable and empathetic, and carry themes of love, compassion, strength, and resilience.
The following is a recent conversation between artist Jose Arias; Qianjin Montoya, Assistant Curator; and Arianne Gelardin, Curatorial Assistant.
Jose Arias, American 1, 2018. Inkjet photo print.
AG: The first time you introduced yourself to us, you described yourself very directly as a “first-generation Mexican-American, Queer, Veteran, artist living in San Francisco.” It’s a specific and self-determined description that seemed important for you to convey. How is self-representation present in your artistic practice?
JA: It really started with a sense of urgency to create a visual archive for the twins—my niece and nephew—so they could see the complexity of their own identities. I’ve also been reflecting on how photography has played a role in my understanding of myself.
My parents come from very little in Mexico, meaning they come from a lot in terms of culture, love, healing, adversity, and not-having. My father was orphaned at a very young age and had only one photograph of his mother and one of his father. Those two photographs were bequeathed to the younger siblings out of the nine in his family. Growing up in Pomona, CA in the 80s and 90s, we took tons of photographs of ourselves, my cousins and my siblings, because my parents finally had access to photography in a way that was not part of their growing up.
In terms of representation, images of ourselves are often considered narcissistic, but for me it was the beginning of understanding photography. Where does the camera go? Where are people situated? Todos Americanos is a collection of family photos, but they're not snapshots the way other family photos are.
Jose Arias, American 3, 2019. Inkjet photo print.
AG: When did the images shift from family snapshots to something more intentional and controlled?
JA: That happened when I went through art school [at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago]. I was taught that you start a project with a set of parameters in mind, and so my parameters started to develop almost as a collaboration with my family.
At the time, I was reading texts like Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz, and thinking about how masks are used in Mexican culture. I decided that no smiling was the first rule. When you take a family photo, the instinct is to smile. I place people in the frames, they can do as they wish once they're in the place that I assign to them, but no smiling. The teenage boys sometimes get really self-conscious because they're starting to learn how to portray masculinity. With these portraits, I'm taking one of the tools of their toolbox away. The posture and positions that people are in, there's a set of norms.
QM: Yeah, there are roles that people play in the family dynamic depending on who's in the immediate space. It can be gender-specific, it can be age-specific. Are you single or are you married into the family? Are you living at home? Are you taking care of your parents? Or are you making money? All those things play a part in how each person is positioned in the composition.
JA: Part of why I'm reconstructing family dynamics through these images is that there's a narrative about machismo in our culture, and sometimes I'm surprised when it happens in my family because that's not how I remember it. One of the things I'm trying to create or pose in my work is the counter-narrative of what I saw as a kid. For me, the women in my family were the ones that made decisions. They were the ones that held the family together.
In creating that narrative, that archive, that documentation of what our family is, it was important for me to also capture the other part that isn't often talked about when we talk about machismo.
QM: That intention comes out very strongly, not just in the images, but in the way you talk about the work. Our heteronormative, patriarchal society defines us so that we fit neatly in a box. “Are you Mexican or are you American?” Okay, we'll say Mexican-American. That's about as mixed as we can make it.
But what does that mean for the people who try to create an identity? That's why we have words like "Chicano," because we are just as Mexican as we are American, but in that same statement, we are something totally different. All of those things have to be true because I'm standing here and I'm an example of that truth.
JA: In José Esteban Muñoz's Cruising Utopia, the opening sentence describes "queer" as not yet here, it's the destination. It is the place we're going. That one sentence is exactly what you're describing. It's also the ethos of the Chicano Movement. It's not where we're at, it's where we want to be. It's where we're going.
QM: And it's not what anyone else has said that we are.
JA: Born in East LA (1987) staring Cheech Marin—
QM: I love that movie. Unfortunately, it's dated in some ways, but it is a perfect example of seeing yourself on the screen and realizing that, wow, other people think that’s funny too, other people have that issue, too.
JA: That film was fundamental for me in so many ways. Watching it as a kid, I could see, visually, that, like Cheech’s character, I was neither from here (the U.S.) nor there (Mexico), and that I could be read in two completely different ways, that I have a complex identity that not everybody is going to see right away.
QM: There are different cultures embedded in my identity, which my DNA will put into percentages, but in my life, it’s all mixed up. There are no lines between things, until you start to look at language, how the mainstream labels me and tells me how Mexican I am. We need to shift and by we, I mean museums, historians, whoever is taking up the space to create these narratives. Jose, your work speaks to the amazing effort to create a new narrative. Earlier you referred to an "exploration of urgency" in creating a record. You've charged yourself to explore something that is so important.
As an artist, Jose, you stand on the shoulders of people in the Chicano Movement of the 60s and 70s, who declared, "I don't have to be a painter of a brown fist breaking chains in order for you to know that I'm a Chicano artist."
JA: Asco is a perfect example of pushing up against what a Chicano or Latin-American artist is supposed to be. Asco is such a fundamental part of my understanding of Chicano, that rebellion in us. There's also Harry Gamboa, with his portraits of Latinx men and the story behind those. But then I still feel like my work is unique in that it's not just about the Hispanic experience, it's about what an American experience is. My family is spread throughout the U.S., and with that are so many different experiences to tell. That is emblematic of what America is.
There's also a need for the cultural touchpoints that inform the work. Like Born in East LA, or La India Maria, believe it or not.
QM: She's a great example of someone who I loved, and it wasn't until later that I thought, "Oh, this is problematic."
JA: Here's the thing about La India Maria. I totally get why the premise is problematic, but I also feel like it's another form of the archive—she captures something that my grandparents’ generation experienced, but that I never had access to, first hand. I learned about a time in Mexico when people had to migrate from the countryside to the cities. People were racially profiled, even within their own country, because of their ethnic background. Through slapstick comedy, La India Maria expresses the duality of identities, language, and signifiers, such as what clothing people wear and how they interact with others.
AG: Something that I'm finding fascinating as I listen, is that the experience of seeing these films and pop cultural references from within the culture that it's coming out of is completely different than someone like me watching it, where it feels really dangerous, as a white person. All I can see are tropes and stereotypes, but what I'm hearing from you is that there's so much value and so much to learn about yourself underneath all that entertainment, all that making fun of.
JA: Yeah—going back to what you were saying earlier, Qianjin, there's a complexity. Understanding this work within its context is important. With La India Maria, she was very astute, and that was part of the gig. She was the underdog that would succeed, sometimes not even succeed, but she was still an epic failure in the narrative of the film that the audience identified with. It was you on film taking on the man, if you will. Understanding her complex identity and being able to identify with her in her complexity, allows one to see beyond the initial shock of tropes. She represented a marginalized group of people and in many ways still does. Her films allowed me to understand the complexities of my identity as a child growing up..
I appreciate the level of conversations that are happening about race, diversity and inclusion and I appreciate a lot of the allyship that is happening today, but as an artist, I am concerned about the militancy around some of the approaches. The sword that's getting wielded in one direction can quickly turn around in the opposite direction, whereas meaningful and substantial conversations about these things take more time and render better—not better, but different results that benefit the longevity of our society.
QM: I think it's so great that you identified that, and in terms of that complexity and nuance, I'm no longer interested in people dropping big names of artists or movements. I'm interested in the work, the practice, the viewership, the engagement and the willingness to give their time. Show me that you took the time to understand the nuance, to ask questions, to be vulnerable. Those are the things that I think are the most interesting and valuable parts of being an ally.
My response when people ask, "What are we going to do now?" is, "What are you going to do now?" I have been doing this my whole life. This is not to say that we're in a place where we don't need to learn anymore. It's just that we're very aware, in some cases—especially with today's “wokeness”—the reason it's so heavy is because we know how much time and energy it takes.
JA: There's a poem, “I am Joaquin” by Rodolfo Gonzales. The core of it is—I'm pulling out a lot of Latin or Chicanox 101, Ari, sorry.
AG: Well, I had to Google it. So there you go.
JA: And that’s important too. I got a very Western education. When I started this project, Todos Americanos, I literally did Google searches for Chicanox college courses to fill in my five-star education with my Latin identity.
To talk about those empty spaces, Jason Lazarus’s approach to photography is to highlight the things you're not seeing. A photograph of Emmett Till's grave site, for instance, where you're not seeing his body. It’s about the absence of him. Or turning photographs on the back so you don't actually see the image, but you see the writing on the backside. Filling in the archives sometimes is similarly about what you don't get to see. That poem, “I am Joaquin,” talks about how I am both a descendant of Montezuma, but also of Hernan Cortez. I'm the colonized and the colonizer at the same time.
QM: Absolutely. And I think that's why those words like “Hispanic”—I'm going to send you an interview that my dad did in the 70s, and I cannot speak to what he's wearing because it was before I was born. There's a necklace that's just really ill-advised.
JA: Just a wonderful outfit.
QM: [Laughs], yes, his personality really comes out in the interview. Part of what he talks about is what it meant for certain folks to call themselves Chicano, and for others to call themselves Hispanic. His defense of “Chicano” and rejection of “Hispanic” at that time was about, for example: by nature of our last names and our bloodline—we're descendants of colonizers, so why would we also align our identity in the moment with Hispania, with the Hispanic colonizer? Why wouldn't we be the authors of our current narrative? I can't change my last name, Montoya. That's the most Spanish name ever. All of us have these names you can find among the colonizers, but to what degree do we start to create our own narratives?
JA: Yeah. Exactly. This is part of my notebook work with Todos Americanos—I am a merger of two timelines. Thanksgiving at our house is turkey with beans and rice and the Mexican fixings around.
QM: Yeah. We have calabazas.
JA: My dad used to say that he and my mom were Mexican, but we, the children, were American. That was very complicated for us. Why would we be something different from our parents? We came from them. It wasn't one way or the other, it was everything.
QM: When people say, "Oh, what are you?" I say, "I'm Mexican and Chinese." But I wasn't born in Mexico. My dad wasn't born in Mexico. My grandparents weren't born in Mexico. They're from parts of New Mexico and Arizona that were Mexico at some point. So everyone grew up speaking Spanish. The only immigrant in my family closest to me is my mom's father who came from China. Growing up in this family, I didn’t call myself Chicano or Chicana because it was so politicized in my family. I felt like I didn’t really have that kind of fervor. It feels strange to call myself a Chicana sometimes, but I totally understand. I align myself with that group, but I don't necessarily always state it. I might need to unlearn some of my ways of stating my identity.
JA: It's about the urgency of having to be your own. I would describe myself as queer or Latinx or Chicanox or Chicano, whereas my brother would just say, "I'm American," or, "I'm Mexican-American," and that would be the end of it for him. Or, "I am first-generation American." My brother would have a completely different approach. We're completely different. I love him very dearly.
AG: It’s interesting how each generation has a new set of language tools to define themselves. I think that with your niece and nephew, their generation will be that much more nuanced than our generation, which is also that much more nuanced than our parents’ or our grandparents’ generation in how we identify ourselves. For me, my great-grandparents are Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. That's one or two generations earlier in my timeline than what you are experiencing. That difference of a couple decades, and the difference of my experience identifying as a white person, changes so much in how I identify as “American”, rather than, say, “Russian-American.”
JA: I think that's one of the reasons why, when I was trying to decide whether I was going to do Todos Americanos, I quickly realized that there are going to be sections in the family that are going to get to the point that you're describing faster than others. The twins don't have that option right now. They are still maybe a generation or two away from it because their father is an immigrant.
QM: It's so interesting the things that stick. My statement of saying, “I'm not an immigrant, my parents aren't immigrants, but I was in a situation recently where someone was talking about a really young student, and the student mentioned how hard they work and that they sometimes get frustrated because other students don't do it at the same level—they don't have the same kind of work ethic. What I understood immediately from speaking to that student was, "This is the child of immigrants. This is an immigrant work ethic." They don't have an option for leisure, and even if they do—because they're technically Americans—they grew up in a home where their parents were immigrants and leisure was not an option. I could recognize this, even though it was never my reality, or technically my parents’ reality. And they obviously had a layer making it harder than it was for me because they were that much closer to the immigrant experience.
JA: I think what you're hitting on is what gets inherited from one generation to the next in the immigrant experience—
QM: Consciously and unconsciously. Yeah.
JA: In the case of Transparent, which is an Amazon series that explores among other themes the inheritance of trauma, there is the memory of genocide and the Holocaust, and how this trauma affects the family and how they talk about their ancestors and so on and so forth. Like Latinx families, the trauma of bifurcation through the diaspora of immigration is also true. Going back to my original point, for my family, photography is part of understanding that.
QM: I love that.
